Musings from me, Olivia.

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How To: Pink Ombre Cake…

So last time I posted about our little girl’s second birthday party, and did promise I would Blog about how to make the pink ombre birthday cake.

I decided to go for a simple Victoria Sponge recipe- because, who doesn’t love a classic sponge cake?! I just used the BBC Good Food recipe which you can find here, and it really it as simple as 2, 2, 2, & 4!

Despite wanting to make a 4 layer cake, I still stuck to these quantities and just made them twice, as I thought that would be easier than having loads and loads of mixture in one bowl. I will mention here that I absolutely on purpose ‘forgot’ to put the baking powder in. It was going to be 4 layers; I didn’t want it getting too tall. Ahem. No one noticed.

Now if I had left it at that, this would have been a super duper easy peasy cake. But no, I had to make it pink. I had got the food colouring gel, as I heard that worked best, and I got it in pink and red as I wasn’t entirely sure which would work best. I tried a bit of both and I do think the red actually had a better colour. What they don’t tell you with all these fancy pictures on Pinterest, is just how much bloomin’ food colouring you need! I used almost a whole tube of it. You do need quite a lot to get the deeper colour pinks.

Once baked, I sliced the tops off 3 of the cakes (leaving one rounded one for the top layer) which did reveal the pinky colour inside and got me feeling just a tad excited. It had worked! Then there was a classic filling of vanilla butter icing and jam. Can’t go wrong with that combo. I didn’t put too much icing in between each layer as I was going to be plastering it all over the outside of the cake in a rustic, home-made looking fashion.

I did make this the day before the party, and gave a quick ‘crumb coating’ of butter icing before putting it in the fridge for a bit. As much as I like to pretend I am Mary Berry, I won’t pretend I knew what a crumb coating was at first… I did look that up. It’s basically a base coat of icing, and I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary, but it did make me feel like I knew what I was doing. I then took it out of the fridge and just kept it covered over night.

It was a fairly simple process, and although it did involve a few tears and I did threaten to cancel the whole party at one point, I think it went well.

I did anticipate myself getting rather stressed, and so went for the somewhat easier shop bought version of the Vanilla Butter Icing, and boy am I glad I did. The next morning before the party, I was calmly finishing off the icing on the cake, without a worry, and with a relatively clean kitchen.

Although I enjoy baking, I often opt for the easy stuff and am rarely as adventurous to try something like this, but I am so glad I did. Not only was it pretty, it was pretty yummy too.